Big Things From a Small World

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Those of us who carry a lap top computer which contains more computing power than machines that filled an entire room in the 1960's, tend to think that things can't get much smaller or faster.

Sometime in the next twenty years, nanotechnology, that is the rearrangement of atoms to manufacture products with specific properties, will be upon us.  Economists claim that, by then, nanotechnology will support a commercial market in excess of 1.5 trillion dollars per year.

For centuries, chemists have made new materials by rearranging atoms and molecules on the macro or large scale.  But the idea of putting individual atoms exactly where we want them to make something with designer properties has always been out of reach.  The problem is that we are too big to hold and position atoms and molecules on a molecular scale.

Nanotechnology will use little assemblers, that is clusters of atoms that act like little arms pushing atoms into the position we want them to be in to make them into something else.

Already carbon nanotubes, many thousand sizes smaller than a period in the newspaper, have been woven into large sheets, so thin that an acre of the material weighs only a quarter of a pound.  They can conduct a thousand times as much electric current as copper and withstand over 34,000 pounds per square inch of pressure without tearing.

So next time someone challenges you to think big, remind them that the biggest innovations are occurring in the realm of the very small, through nanotechnology.